Peter Carey’s eighth novel My Life as a Fake (2003) enables its author to develop his fascination with questions of forgery and inauthenticity, both of which have become hallmarks of his work. Engaging with the ambiguous postcolonial identity of white Australian settler culture, Carey has regularly presented Australian characters as shifty imitations of either Americans or the English, lacking a culture of their own and trying to create an identity through mimicry of more dominant national types. In early novels like Bliss (1981), The Tax Inspector (1991) and Illywhacker (1985), Carey presented Australian characters like Bliss’s Bettina Joy yearning to be American, whilst emphasizing the “fakery” of more down-to-earth Australians by casting them as liars and second-hand car salesmen. By his 1997 novel Jack Maggs, Carey had begun to challenge this valorization of other cultures...
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Citation: Moore, Grace. "My Life as a Fake". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 January 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=13344, accessed 12 February 2026.]
